yoga teachers: omniscient or just average?

“She devoted the class to something I’d been wanting to work on for ages. It was amazing.”

“He just gets you, somehow.”

All of these quotations are straight from students’ mouths. And all of them are about yoga teachers. Conclusion: Yoga teachers are god-like beings, able to read people’s minds and know them intimately without even talking to them. Right?

Or Maybe They Just RollFunny. Though I may be at risk of offending the Lululemon employee who said to me, “Don’t tell me yoga teachers think like me; I don’t want to know that,” I’m going to go on record to state: Actually, there’s nothing very special about yoga teachers. Not really. We ‘get’ people because we are people. We understand what people might be going through because we go through it ourselves. And we can speak to things that people want to hear about because we’re all people going through this same human experience.

Yoga, You, Me, They, WeIt’s an understatement to say yoga is a practice of self-awareness. But it’s also an essential truth. And one that yogis–whether we teach or not–know intimately. Yoga is also a practice of union. And yogis–whether we teach or not–know this intimately, too. Combine these two practices, and what do you get? An understanding of our self, and the knowledge that we are all united as similar beings. We recognize in others what we recognize in ourselves.

Everybody can get people. Everybody can get themselves. And everybody can be a teacher–of whatever they want to share.